


Plums and Blueberries

by Hilo



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cooking, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 13:29:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15686367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hilo/pseuds/Hilo
Summary: Steve tries to help Bucky in his recovery by buying food that helps with memory. Soft feelings are added to the recipe.





	Plums and Blueberries

“Hey, do you remember if we have any pasta left?”, Steve asked, uncooked bag of spaghettis in hand. He turned around to face Bucky, only to find him a few feet apart from him, on the fruit section.  
  
Steve put the pasta on their basket and walked to his friend. He seemed to be deep in thought, bent over to get a closer look on some oranges. He was inspecting them, very focused, turning each around in search of who knows what and setting aside the ones who he approved of.  
  
His shoulders tensed for a moment when Steve stopped next to him, but relaxed a bit after recognizing his shoes. The man muttered something, so low that Steve was sure he was not aware of having voiced it aloud, and kept expertly twisting the oranges with the fingers of only one hand. His face was obscured by a hat, secured between the brown locks. Bucky became easily overwhelmed on super markets. They were brightly illuminated, saturated with colors and crowded, full of people who talked and made a lot of noise, that mixed with the constant radio playing above their heads on every corner, and moved behind countless of big aisles, making them hard to target and keep an eye on. Old habits die hard, especially those learnt to survive and enforced during so many years; Bucky could not stop himself from analyzing every environment he entered, registering who, how many and where. But he still insisted on going grocery shopping with Steve. He usually trailed behind him and hid his face under a worn out red hat, both to protect himself from being seen and from seeing too much, leaving his hair free to narrow even more the visual input. So it was weird for him to have lowered his guard and gotten separated from Steve because something caught his interest, peeking behind his barriers.  
  
“Do you want oranges?”, Steve asked, unable to stop himself. He was curious and he took one of them. He could wrap his fingers around it and they touched on the other end; even after so many years, it still feel weird to discover new situations in which he felt too big, way bigger than he had ever dreamed.  
  
“Oranges are good for memory”, Bucky said, still in a restrained and low voice. He straightened his back and got a plastic bag, struggling to open it with just one hand and awkwardly flopping it around before using it as a glove to pick the pieces he had selected, twisting the bag the other way and handing it to Steve. His gaze was lingering on a lost spot between his nose and cheek, not meeting his eyes, as if he felt guilty and not sure if this was a boundary he was crossing.  
  
Bucky was trying so hard to remember. He had been fighting to get back his memories, to piece together his past from before Hydra and own himself. It had been almost a year since they found him in that dark and dirty apartment and even then, alone, afraid and barely holding himself together from withdrawal, he had been collecting information. On his last mission, on Steve, on himself, on the world around him, on this present that seemed as strange as the past he supposedly grew up in. It was all neatly organized on dozens of notebooks, the only sign of Bucky Steve could find in his apartment. Most of the pages were from newspapers or copied from Internet articles (and in the most recent notebooks, printed); but some of them were fractioned memories, flashes of smells and sounds and sensations that invaded his brain. Those pages broke the methodic and neat look, filling the space in hurried handwriting, like he feared that if he didn’t write what he was remembering in that exact moment, it will fly away as fast as it came.  
  
Then, after so much fighting and tears, Bucky was released of one of his biggest burdens on Wakanda. He now had recovered some of his freedom, no longer under the spell of ominous words and heavy drugs. Bucky moved in with Steve almost right away. In the insides of their shared home, Steve learned the price Bucky paid for his found memories. He screamed into consciousness, sweating from the nightmares and obsessing over their accuracy, dissecting which of the wicked scenarios were more blood on his hands and which were just smears on the fog of his brain. The first nights Steve hadn’t known how to act. He had tried comforting Steve with a hug, but he had worsened the situation, leading the man into a nervous breakdown. From then on, and after a very intense bonding moment, Steve learned how to approach Bucky after a nightmare, how to ground him and make him feel safe enough and not threatened by his presence.  
  
Nine months of living together, therapy and enhanced Paxil tablets, Bucky’s memories (and him) were at their best. But moments like those, Bucky searching for oranges, hoping they would help him even if just a little, reminded Steve of how fickle recovery really was. How many days Bucky’s memories faded into nothingness and he couldn’t get out of bed, feeling numb and apathy overtaking his head, left too empty to even recall who Steve was. How many days Bucky’s memories flooded his brain and flashed so fast and so vivid behind his eyelids that he had to lock himself on the bathroom and panic on the tub, unable to move. How many days the feelings mixed together and Bucky was kicked back into survival mode because he had woken up in a place he didn’t recognize with a man stronger and taller than him.  
  
Hydra had fucked up his short and long term memory and that was something Bucky would have to fight against for the foreseeable future. So if Bucky thought a bag of oranges was going to help him, Steve was buying him the damn oranges. He took the bag from Bucky’s hand and tied a knot, placing them next to the pasta.  
  
He smiled to him and tried not to think too hard about the implications of Bucky still doubting he was allowed to ask for things.  
  
“What’s next on the list?”

\---

“… Cream remaining butter with sugar and lemon zest”, Steve read the recipe from the floating screen in front of him. He eyed the ingredients he had lined up on the counter. Did he have to use the brown sugar or the white one? And what did cream mean? Was he supposed to melt this half of the butter? “I hate cooking”, he whined, placing the solid stick of butter on a bowl and microwaving it for a few seconds. This was his first ever attempt at baking (unless you count smashing apples, adding sugar and baking them; in that case, he should be an expert by the many times he has had to bake rotting apples in his youth). He shook his head and started whisking the mix, determined. He was doing this for Bucky.  
  
After the supermarket incident, he had searched for more food that would help with memory. He found out the reason why Bucky seemed to tolerate fatty fish all of a sudden when he could barely shallow a bite back in the 30s. But he wanted to make this pleasant to him, so he settled for trying to bake a plum and blueberry upside-down cake (key word: try). It was an ambitious challenge for an amateur, as he had soon discovered. The round cake pan was sitting on his right, already toppled with the plums (messily sliced) and blueberries, and the oven was starting to radiate heat to his legs as it preheated.  
  
“You know only the white of the eggs are the ones that get stiff when whisking right?”, Bucky’s voice almost made Steve drop the bowl he had been beating. He turned around and saw his friend smiling, sleepy eyes and most of his hair escaping the bun, red soft marks still decorating his cheek from the nap. He slept a lot during the day, when the night terrors kept him awake and shivering.  
  
“I didn’t mean to wake you up”, Steve apologized. He felt bad for disturbing his well-deserved rest. He turned again, and resumed his whisking, this time softer, since foam had formed at the top from his enthusiastic moves  
.  
“You didn’t”, Bucky moved to his side, eyeing his creation. “You have dented a bit the bowl”, he commented, nail digging in one of the thin lines Steve had left on the side. He chuckled and nuzzled his shoulder playfully. This is a good day, Steve thought. He loved the days when Bucky was able to loosen up and tease him and touch him; he looked so much like the young boy that helped him cook the apples with sugar.  
  
“Since you are so smart”, Steve said, and grabbed a second bowl to press it against his chest. “Mix flour, baking soda and salt”, he pointed to the ingredients.  
  
Bucky settled next to him and obeyed without question; but it didn’t feel forced nor submissive, it was a consensual order, something he wanted to help with, not because Steve had told him so. They worked on comfortable silence. Bucky was struggling a bit to whisk with one arm and kept rearranging the plate in front of him, so Steve continued to move his own mix around, even if he could barely feel the grains of sugar underneath, to buy him some time. Once Bucky announced he was finished (how did you even differentiate those three ingredients from each other to know they were evenly mixed?), they slowly added the dry mix to the butter one. Steve whisked and Bucky alternated from holding the bowl to pouring milk. Once they got rid of any lumps, Steve moved the pan to their side.  
  
“Are those blueberries?”, Bucky asked.  
  
“And plums”, Steve said, starting to spread the batter over them.  
  
“Oh”, Bucky got even closer to him and Steve had never been more thankful for his super strength because he was sure he would have dropped the bowl by now, judging by the way Bucky’s warm breath grazing his neck was making his hands tremble. He stretched his arm to steal one of the slices and pop it on his mouth. He hummed happily and smiles, the corners of his eyes wrinkling in a soft expression. “Those are good for memory”, and his voice wavered.  
  
Steve hummed in response, too flustered to work a proper answer. Instead, he focused on the task at hand and touched up a little bit the batter to even it out. He kept poking it though, playing with the texture; Bucky was standing in front of the oven blocking his way, but he didn’t want to ask him to move over and lose their contact. He was also almost sure they were having a moment. He let his skin remember the smooth texture of Bucky’s, crave the pressure of his muscles against him, before he finally reunited the courage to twist his torso and look him in the eye. Blue clear eyes held his and his breath flew away in a shiver.  
  
“I…”, he started, but Bucky opened his mouth (God, since when had his lips gotten so pink? He didn’t remember them so full and tempting before) and spoke first.  
“Thank you”, and his voice sounded raw with emotion. He pulled his lips back together and stretched them into a smile. The gesture still seemed foreign to him, but it reached his eyes with sincerity, warmer than before.  
  
Steve straightened his back and used that momentum to softly push Bucky aside and occupy his hands with setting the cake pan on the oven, breaking the eye contact. He closed the door and set the temporizer to 50 minutes, but kept his gaze down.  
  
It’s the least I can do, he wanted to say. He knew Bucky hated when he blamed himself, but he couldn’t help the wave of guilt that washed over him whenever he saw his best friend struggle. He was convinced he could have saved him, if only he had been more careful, if only he had jumped after him, if only. Nevertheless, he also knew that he couldn’t change the past. And this was the present he was living. He didn’t want to help Bucky out of guilt nor to wash his conscience. He wanted to help him because he was his friend and he loved him and maybe was in love with him, and he wanted to make him feel safe when the world seemed to be falling around him.  
So he took a deep breath and looked up, still crouched.  
  
“I am going to eat this cake too, you know”, he joked. And he made the right choice, because Bucky dropped to the floor and hugged him.  
  
Steve’s breath caught up in his throat and formed a knot and suddenly all the air he could get inside his lungs smelled like Bucky, warm and slightly like sweat from the nap, but also fresh and sweet from the strawberry shampoo he used, and familiar like home. His face was buried in the crook of his neck and the beard itched the sensitive skin there, but Steve didn’t waste any more time before bringing his arms up and circling the other man’s waist, pulling him tight against him and inhaling deeply.  
  
“I love you”, he whispered. Bucky’s muscles tensed under his palms, so he moved them up and down in a soothing motion. “I know”, he reasured. Because he felt overwhelmed with affection and knew that Bucky felt the same, even if he wasn’t there yet, couldn’t push the words out of his mouth. But that was okay. Steve was happy; they were hugging, Bucky was relaxed again, and Steve could wait. He had waited 70 years thinking he had lost him, he could wait all eternity with him breathing between his arms.  
  
They were later startled when the alarm went off and they disentangled themselves to get the cake out. They were too impatient to wait for it to cool, so they shared a fork and ate the cake, sitting on the counter and waving their hands in front of their mouths to cool their bites, laughing and recalling memories that felt a little closer.

**Author's Note:**

> English is not my first language, so if you spot any mistake, please tell me! I want to improve.  
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
